Queed eBook

He looked up and found the sardonic Italian eyes of
the old professor fixed on him with a most curious
expression.... No, no! Better even Mrs.
Paynter’s than solitude shared with this stagey
old man, with his repellent face and his purring voice
which his eyes so belied.

“I must be going,” said Queed hastily.

His host came forward with suave expressions of regret.
“However, I feel much complimented that you
came at all. Pray honor me again very soon—­”

“I’ll return this book sometime,”
continued the young man, already at the door.
“You won’t mind if I mark it, of course?”

“My dear sir—­most certainly not.
Indeed I hoped that you would consent to accept it
for your own, as a—­”

“No, I’ll return it. I daresay you
will find,” he added with a faint smile, but
his grossest one, “that my notes have not lessened
its value exactly!”

In the hall Queed looked at his watch; ten minutes
to ten. Twenty-five minutes to his visit upon the
old professor!

However, let us be calm and just about it. The
twenty-five minutes was not a flat loss: he had
got Crozier by it. Crozier was worth twenty-five
minutes; thirty-five, if it came to that—­fifty!...
But how to fit such a thing as this into the Schedule—­and
Klinker’s visits—­and the time he
had given to Fifi to-night and very likely would have
to give through an endless chain of to-morrows?
Here was the burning crux. Was it endurable that
the Schedule must be corrupted yet again?

So far as little Fifi was concerned, it turned out
that these agonies were superfluous; he had helped
her with her lessons for the last time. She did
not appear in the dining-room the next night, or the
next, or the next. Inquiries from the boarders
drew from Mrs. Paynter the information that the child’s
cough had pulled her down so that she had been remanded
to bed for a day or two to rest up. But resting
up appeared not to prove so simple a process as had
been anticipated, and the day or two was soon running
into weeks.

Halcyon nights Queed enjoyed in the dining-room in
Fifi’s absence, yet faintly marred in a most
singular way by the very absence which alone made
them halcyon. It is a fact that you cannot give
to any person fifteen minutes of valuable time every
night, and not have your consciousness somewhat involved
in that person’s abrupt disappearance from your
horizon. Messages from Fifi on matters of most
trivial import came to Queed occasionally, and these
served to keep alive his subtle awareness of her absence.
But he never took any notice of the messages, not
even of the one which said that he could look in and
see her some afternoon if he wanted to.

XI

Concerning a Plan to make a Small Gift to a Fellow-Boarder, and
what it led to in the Way of Calls; also touching upon Mr. Queed’s
Dismissal from the Post, and the Generous Resolve of the Young
Lady, Charles Weyland.